Lockdown: Economic Support

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Steve Barclay]

At the risk of repeating myself, I refer the hon. Lady to the reply I gave earlier, but she did make a specific point about those who may have recently been made redundant. [Interruption.] Again, the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) chunters from a sedentary position. The hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine) made a specific point about those recently made redundant and I was just coming on to answer that precise point. Employees notified by real-time information submission to HMRC on or before 30 October are eligible for the furlough extension, but employees employed as of 23 September, which is the day of the job support scheme announcement, and notified to HMRC by RTI on or before that date who have since been made redundant can be re-hired. In answer to the hon. Lady’s question, the timing is important, but the point is that people can be re-hired as part of the furlough extension.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

I am glad that the Government agree that where, by law, they stop people working and earning a living, they should compensate them. Will the Government look again at the terms of the scheme for the self-employed—there are restrictions on several categories of self-employed who have no other means of earning their living and no large company support—and be more generous? Does my right hon. Friend agree that we need all those self-employed people to be ready to return to work to get some kind of recovery going soon, because the economy is in deep trouble?

[Steve Barclay]

I agree with my right hon. Friend that we need to ensure that the economy is able to bounce back quickly. That is why we have provided over £13 billion of support to the self-employed, which by international comparisons—I know my right hon. Friend looks at international comparisons—he will see is extremely generous. I have set out previously in the House part of the operational difficulties, for example with owner-directors in terms of what is dividend income and what is not. The point is that we have set out a generous self-employment income support scheme, but we need to deliver that operationally in a way that meets the tests set by, for example, the Public Accounts Committee, which has asked whether we have the right level of controls in place, given the speed at which these schemes were deployed.

The Economy

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Wednesday 8th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Steve Barclay]

As the hon. Gentleman knows, the Chancellor addressed that issue in his statement earlier. Indeed, he wrote to the industry in March setting out the terms on which Government support would be offered, including the requirement for firms first to look at what support they could receive from their own commercial backers and shareholders. On individual firms, what discussions take place is a matter of commercial confidentiality, but the Chancellor indicated both his engagement in that issue and that of the Secretary of State for Transport.

All in all, the United Kingdom’s economic response to covid is one of the most comprehensive and generous of any Government’s in the world. The past few months have been hard for everyone, particularly the many families whose loved ones have lost their lives. But thanks to our collective grit and determination, the tide was turned and the infection rates fell, and we are now in a position to reopen our economy in a way that is safe to do.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

As one who thinks it is exactly right, as a one-off cost, to spend and cut taxes at the moment to promote economic recovery, I accept that we have to borrow to do that. When will we be getting some revised numbers on what the borrowing might amount to?

[Steve Barclay]

There are two issues within that. First, there are the revised numbers from the Office for Budget Responsibility, which has set a timescale for when it will set those out. Then there is the more substantive issue, as the Chancellor set out in his statement, of seeing the plan for jobs in the context of three phases. The medium-term recovery that we need will be set out in the autumn with the Budget and the comprehensive spending review. Again, that will be an important milestone in this three-phase approach.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

I have declared my business interests in the Register.

We need a job-rich recovery. I therefore strongly welcome the measures that the Chancellor has announced today. Some of those measures will save jobs. Some of those measures will create or stimulate new jobs. The Government are right to worry that we have lost too many jobs already over the closures and they are right to worry that we might lose more in the days ahead. They are right to make the changes they are making to the furlough scheme, to encourage as many of those jobs as possible to return, and they are also right to say that we cannot carry on with a furlough scheme indefinitely; there has to be a test of whether there is still a job there. If we roll it on for too long, there will be no real job left, and it becomes just a different kind of benefit, delaying the time when that person can retrain or find a better prospect for their work.

What do we need to extend this jobs recovery? First, we need plenty of money and credit around, so that it is available for the business to pick up and the incomes to rise. The new Governor is a welcome breath of fresh air. As I have mentioned before, the previous Governor went in for extreme austerity, which slowed the economy needlessly. The new Governor has corrected for that and made a very big boost at the beginning of this crisis, which has been extremely helpful. I see no need for the Bank to go to negative interest rates. I do not think the Swedish experiment with them was particularly helpful, and the Swiss experiment is specific to the pressure on the Swiss franc, which we do not have on the pound. I do not think we need to go to negative interest rates, but I would say that the Bank is in danger now of going rather slowly on the quantitative easing and loosening. We see that in some of the figures coming out.

If we compare our figures with those of the United States of America and the Fed, we see that the Fed is doing twice as much or more than the Bank of England, proportionate to the size of the economy. Some might think that perhaps the Fed is doing a little bit too much and the US might end up with some inflation, but we are in danger of not doing enough again, and I hope that progress will be made in getting the right adjustments.

[Sir Edward Davey (Kingston and Surbiton) (LD)]

Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that while it is right that the Bank of England is doing quantitative easing, how that money is spent ought to have more democratic input? That money could be used for the sorts of investment we need now for jobs and tackling climate change.

[John Redwood]

The money is used to maintain the price of Government bonds so that the Government can borrow on very low interest rates as much money as they want. Investments are therefore determined by this House and the Government, so I cannot quite understand what point the right hon. Gentleman is making.

The Government are right to borrow a lot of money for six months or so, to get us through the crisis and to speed the recovery, but it has to be a one-off. We cannot live like that. One needs to earn a living, but this is a one-off crisis. The markets are such and the Bank of England’s intervention is such that the Government can borrow a lot of money very cheaply and quite long term. That is the best we can do, and it is the right thing to do to try to save jobs and create new jobs.

This week, we have had the summer forecasts from the European Union for the economies of the European Union, and it has still done a UK forecast. It is worrying, because the forecasts say that the French, Italian and Spanish economies will lose more than 11% of their economic output and income this year. They say Britain will be in high single figures—a bit better than those three—although not as good as Germany, which has come through it the best so far. However, the figures are not acceptable, and most people feel that the United States figures will be considerably better, because the US response to this crisis has been on a far bigger scale, both fiscally and in terms of monetary policy, than the European response. The UK needs to be closer to the American example in this case, because this very severe hit to major economies requires something very big to try to carry them through and rescue those jobs.

I hope that the Government will look at the opportunities for sourcing more in the United Kingdom through its purchasing programmes as we leave the European Union. I am all in favour of strong competition, value for money and good pricing, but I think we have had examples of our not having enough national resilience. We found that we could not buy the things abroad that we needed for our health service, because we were relying on others’ goodwill and they needed it for themselves. We are finding that buying things from China comes with all kinds of difficulties. We will find, if we go down the route of importing more and more electricity, that we have strategic weakness in depending on Russian gas, which is the main source of continental energy. I urge the Government to use their purchasing intelligently to give us resilience and more British jobs. Value for money and competition are good, but let us make sure that the purchasing goes to home purposes, just as they do in other countries abroad, where they look after themselves first.

Economic Update

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Wednesday 8th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Rishi Sunak]

I am very happy to look at the proposal from the hon. Gentleman, and I am sure that the Transport Secretary is fully abreast of it. I will pick it up with him as well.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

The focus on jobs, and the measures, are excellent, so will the Government now review the taxes, subsidies and public procurement regulations so that they can be amended to allow us to grow more of our own food, land and process more of our own fish, generate more of our own power, and supply more of the things that our health service and Ministry of Defence require, because it can be better made in Britain, and better made with British jobs?

[Rishi Sunak]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his support, and he is absolutely right: leaving the EU provides us with a unique opportunity to re-examine all our procurement rules and many of our regulations. I share his passion to ensure that, as much as possible, we support our local economy and create jobs, which has never been more vital than it is today.

Finance Bill

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage: House of Commons & Report: 1st sitting & Report: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 1st July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr McFadden]

The matter of what is voted on is of course, a consideration for the Speaker. I do not always get to decide what is voted on in this House.

New clause 26, standing in my name and those of my hon. Friends, focuses on the issue of jobs and does so for the very good reason that that is the principal economic challenge facing us right now. If there was any doubt about that, we need only look at the news over the past 24 hours—1,700 jobs lost at Airbus, up to 5,000 job losses announced by the owners of Upper Crust, 4,500 at easyJet a couple of days ago, another 4,500 at Swissport, and many more around the country that do not make the front page of the national news. These are not just numbers. Every one of them is a human story of a livelihood taken away and a family wondering how they will pay the bills and what the future will hold for them.

Across the country, the claimant count measure of unemployment is up by 1.5 million since the start of the year. In addition to those out of work and the estimated 9 million on furlough schemes, it is estimated that up to 8 million employees are working fewer hours than usual. These stark figures show us that we are facing the jobs challenge of a generation. It is decades since young people leaving school, college or university graduated into a labour market such as this.

Giving my age away, I remember, as a young teenager growing up in Glasgow, attending the people’s march for jobs. Unemployment back then was around 3 million. The vocabulary of it infused the times—“signing on”; “the Girocheque”. It even gave birth to the great band UB40, named after the unemployment card that people got for signing on. The damage caused by that mass unemployment affected not just the city where I grew up, but the Black Country that I now represent, and many similar communities across the country. Long-term social and economic pain was caused by far too many people facing a life on the dole, and we must never go back to those days. If we have learned anything from that experience of the 1980s, it is that the cost of not acting is greater than the cost of acting, and we must do everything we can now to prevent mass unemployment. That is the challenge facing us.

At the start of this crisis we called for wage support to help people through. The furlough scheme and the self-employed furlough scheme were the right and necessary things to do, but as lockdown is eased, and support from those schemes starts to be withdrawn from next month, we can see the danger facing the economy. The danger is that businesses that have been just about hanging on start to let people go, caught between having no income and facing rising employment costs. This is the moment that the Government need to act to preserve jobs, jobs, jobs.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

I agree with the right hon. Gentleman about the importance of jobs. Is he worried that the reform the Government have in mind might mean that a self-employed person working on their own in one of our constituencies could lose a contract to a foreign company, because the big company undertaking the contract might think that was safer?

[Mr McFadden]

I am not sure about the part of the right hon. Gentleman’s intervention that referred to foreign companies, but the turbulence of the labour market right now does pose a danger to contractors. The Government have already recognised that to some degree in the delay announced for this measure.

Withdrawing support schemes at the same pace for all sectors does not recognise that some sectors are in far more difficulty than others, and that is particularly true for any sector based on the idea of people gathering closely together. Many sectors such as transport, aviation, sport, theatre, music, and others, are global British strengths, but right now they are on their knees. Dropping the social distancing rule from two metres to one metre is not enough when, in some cases, any kind of social distancing is impossible. Let us take live music, for example, which is based on the very opposite of social distancing. The break-even point for many venues and events is often being 80% to 90% full, and the change to one metre will not make that much difference to them. We need an approach that takes into account the different impact on different sectors.

If there was already a sectoral problem in withdrawing employment support, there is also now a geographical one, because Leicester is entering its second period of lockdown. Our thoughts go out to the people and businesses there who, like the rest of the country, have made great sacrifices over the past few months. We cannot yet know how long that second period of lockdown in Leicester will last. It could be a few weeks, but equally, it might be longer. Neither can we know whether Leicester will be the only place to go into another lockdown. Other cities may follow, and there has already been speculation about where those might be. How can it be right to withdraw employment support on a national basis when we are no longer in a single national position on the easing of lockdown?

We are asking people and businesses in Leicester today, and possibly other cities in the days and weeks to come, to shut down for a second time, and they should not be penalised for doing so. Will the Minister consider as a matter of urgency flexibility in the unwinding of the furlough and other support schemes, to take account of the new development of at least one, but possibly more, local lockdowns? Let me now turn to the future, and the jobs that might be created. The Government announced their back-to-work plan yesterday.

Finance Bill

Lord Redwood Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons & Programme motion & Programme motion: House of Commons & Ways and Means resolution
Monday 27th April 2020 Commons Chamber

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con) [V]]

I have declared my interests in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

At the time of the Budget it was a very different world. The Government were forecasting a little bit of growth and recommended a modest stimulus. I remember that I was able to welcome that stimulus in the Budget debate—I thought it was right that we boosted public spending a bit and borrowed a bit more—but with masterly understatement I said that I was a bit surprised by the magnitude of the stimulus: I thought that perhaps something more was needed. In the six weeks that have elapsed since then, we have seen a blizzard of announcements that have made it clear that the Government recognise the magnitude of the downturn that now besets us and the world economy and are rightly moving swiftly to try to provide some compensation to the many businesses that cannot trade and the many people whose jobs are under threat or whose income is disappearing because of the lack of work. The response is correct, so the Government should look again at the Finance Bill in the light of the fact that the events that led to its formation  have been completely overtaken by the magnitude of this crisis, and because we will need quite soon a Finance Act that does everything in its power to promote recovery.

Tax rises are not a good idea at all. The Government, in this period of response to the crisis, have offered tax holidays, tax reductions and tax deferrals, which is the right response as the private sector and individuals cannot afford those taxes at the moment with their incomes so rudely interrupted. The Government must also look at the groups of people they are targeting. I urge the Minister to think again about changing the rules on IR35. There are about 5 million self-employed people in this country who have been doing a magnificent job for us. They provide flexibility, service and products that we need and they are very competitive. A number of them have been living under the shadow of those tax changes; some have lost contracts and work to overseas companies and competitors simply from that threat. I therefore urge the Minister to think again and recognise that we need to reward and encourage those people, not threaten them with a new tax. Above all they will offer a lot of the flexibility, hard work and energy that the recovery will need.

The Government are right to provide as much compensation as they can and the Bank of England is right to buy a lot of bonds and create money, but we all know that that is not a sustainable model for the economy in the medium to longer term. I echo the comments of colleagues who rightly said that we need a way back to safe working as quickly as possible. The only way we can afford to pay for the NHS is to have more people at work paying taxes and earning decent incomes, and more companies generating turnover who can then afford company taxation.

Through the Finance Bill and all the other measures the Government can undertake, we must together ensure that we have as early a return to work, and as safe a return to work, as possible, and that means working away with business on better safety so that people have the clothing and equipment they need, automating where necessary and allowing proper social segregation while people are working in warehouses, offices and shops. We need to develop those new business models, and the Government can provide a lead by showing how they can continue to administer their great services while looking after the safety of their employees to the best possible effect. That requires reshaping the Finance Bill. I am delighted that the Minister is thinking of making amendments to the Bill during its passage through the House. I ask him above all to look at measures that could reward companies that go in for a new model, and reward employees and the self-employed who go that extra mile to work safely and create some restoration of service and activity in our economy.

No one in this House has seen anything on this scale or magnitude before. Never have we got to the point where a quarter or more of the companies in the country are not allowed to trade and millions of people are banned from doing their job because of public health and safety considerations. In this situation, we need to offer them a Finance Bill with hope, a Finance Bill that will help them finance the recovery and a Finance Bill that will make it worthwhile for them to lead that recovery as soon as the time comes.

Economic Update

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Rishi Sunak]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his constructive attitude, and I look forward to working with him. The loan terms will be interest-free for six months. Because of the liquidity that has been provided by the Bank of England, they will be incredibly cheap, and they will be available on a rolling basis for commercial paper, so they will be loans that are accessible and very valuable to businesses. They will be ready from next week.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

I am delighted that the Chancellor recognises the need for burden-sharing on employment costs in badly affected sectors such as tourism, travel and hospitality, but will he also make sure that there is a package for the self-employed, because some of those people are losing a large amount of their business, too?

[Rishi Sunak]

My right hon. Friend has written about the importance of employment support, and I look forward to getting his thoughts on those measures.

Growth Strategy

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Tuesday 21st January 2020 Westminster Hall

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the growth strategy for the UK.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. A most welcome change has occurred in economic policy since the advent of the new Prime Minister. We are now told that the aim of economic policy is to promote the greater prosperity of the many in the United Kingdom by means of promoting faster economic growth. The Prime Minister often adds “opportunity” to his justified enthusiasm for growth and greater prosperity.

I welcome that fundamental change, because that is what I have wanted our policy to achieve in recent years, at a time when my party and the general economic establishment thought that priority had to be given to a single, central aim of economic policy—the reduction of state debt as a percentage of GDP. The change of aim in economic policy to the monitoring of state debt occurred first under the Labour Government in 2009, when state debt got out of control. Before the Labour Government left office, they accepted the need to get state debt down, particularly the running deficit, from very high levels, and made some cuts. The coalition Government changed some of those cuts, but went on with that strategy, because they rightly agreed with the outgoing Labour Government that the deficit was far too high and unsustainable.

I supported that policy in those days, but in 2015-16, when the deficit was under better control, I became more concerned about the tension between the central aim of getting the deficit down and the need to promote growth, which, in the longer term, is the best way of getting the deficit down, because it generates more activity and more tax revenue. Therefore, I started campaigning for an economic policy based on the promotion of prosperity. I am delighted that we now have a Government with that as their central aim.

Our economic policy under the previous guidance, from 2009 to 2015, stabilised our position and reduced the state deficit, necessarily, by a substantial amount, without preventing all growth. However, that policy ushered in a period of lower growth than we had experienced prior to the banking crash, primarily because of the way the deficit was tamed. At the time, it was said that the deficit was tamed by big cuts in public spending, but it was mainly tamed by a massive increase in the amount of tax revenue collected from the domestic economy.

It is true that there were individual cuts and individual departmental budgets took a hit, some of which were very contentious on both sides of the House, particularly among the Opposition. However, public spending went up overall in cash terms, and arguably went up slightly in real terms over that period. The main challenge of getting the deficit down was achieved through a series of tax-rate rises and collecting extra tax revenue out of the modest growth that the economy achieved, without any relief of that tax burden. Part of the reason that we had slower growth is that we became a relatively higher tax economy than we had been before.

We have seen an experiment conducted on both sides of the Atlantic since 2016, when the Americans opted for eye-catching and dramatic tax cuts, both cutting the rates companies must pay and putting money into the pocket of every person with a working wage, with a particular emphasis on getting people on the lower end of the income spectrum to have more money to spend. That has proved extremely successful: the American economy has been growing at more than 2% for most of the time since the tax cuts kicked in, whereas the European side, sticking with the Maastricht requirements, deficit reduction requirements and relatively high taxes, has been struggling to grow at 1%.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. He is making a powerful argument for growth across the UK. On the issue of differential employment and income rates, does he agree that if this is to be successful, we must see economic growth and higher wage levels spread more evenly across the UK, so that regions with a much lower wage economy start to see more wealth and employment at the higher end?

[John Redwood]

Indeed, and I welcome the emphasis placed on that by the Prime Minister and Ministers. I hope that we can give them some more ideas on how that can become realistic policy. I am just setting the scene: there has been a big change in the aim of policy, which I warmly welcome. I suggest to the Minister and others that lower taxes might be an important way of trying to develop that aim. The experiment conducted on both sides of the Atlantic seems to suggest that countries with the ambition and desire to cut taxes on working incomes and businesses will experience more growth and success. We have seen a lot of money repatriated to the United States of America by big businesses, which now find the tax rates acceptable and therefore do not require the same legal structures—I am sure they were behaving legally—to keep the money offshore or not to pay taxes for the time being in the United States.

The United Kingdom Government have, even during difficult times, decided on lower corporation tax rates. I think we have a competitive corporation tax structure. Our lack of tax competitiveness rests in the treatment of individuals and income, and employment costs, rather than corporation tax, where we have done a good job relative to continental Europe. We are benefiting from that. It was good to hear it announced this week that the UK is now the third preferred destination for technology investment after only the United States and China—two economies much larger than our own—and that we are attracting more investment than the combined totals of France and Germany, so we must be getting something right in our approach to business investment and the taxation of business profits.

The Government have already set out a new fiscal framework, which I welcome, because they understand that it is not sufficient just to set a new aim for policy—they need a fiscal framework to deliver it. They have directly addressed the issue of state debt, saying that they will not spend money on revenue matters that is not covered by taxation—a prudent control on the situation—but they have also said that there is nothing wrong with the budget deficit expanding from just over 1% to 3%, if the purpose is for good investment, especially given the very low rates that the Government now have to pay to borrow money.

I think that is a sensible compromise that gives us a bit of scope in the public sector. I trust it will also leave us scope to lower tax rates, which is important for getting extra growth from the private sector, where much of the growth will come from. Today, the Government’s 10-year borrowing rate—if they needed to borrow more money from the market—is 0.63%. One would assume that the public sector can find investment projects and get a return considerably above 0.63%, so I fully endorse what they are trying to do.

I hope we can accept the new policy aims and the new fiscal framework, which give us flexibility, and think about what additional policies the Government might need to adopt to boost that growth rate. I have been predicting for some time that we would have a marked slowdown in the United Kingdom, as a result of the fiscal tightening that we have experienced until now and the monetary tightening that the Bank of England has implemented. It has been very curious that the Bank of England has detached itself from the world’s central banks over this recent very marked slowdown in world activity. The slowdown was led by an actual recession in manufacturing in most parts of the world; the centre of the storm has been in the motor industry, but it has also extended more widely into the consumer and service areas.

The rest of the world’s central banks are busily fighting that, and so we have seen a succession of interest rate cuts in countries with interest rates that could still be cut. We have also seen a resumption of quantitative easing programmes in the European Union, after it perhaps rather foolishly abandoned them at the end of the previous year; we have seen continuous large quantitative easing programmes in Japan; and in China, we have seen a big reduction in the required capital of banks, so that those banks can lend more to the private sector and expand China’s economy, which has also slowed quite markedly.

I suggest to the Treasury Front-Bench team that they look very carefully at the centre of the downturn that we have seen worldwide and mirrored here in the United Kingdom, and in particular at the motor industry. The motor industry was hit by higher taxes on consumers in China; it was hit by changed emission regulations on the continent of Europe; it was hit in the United Kingdom by increases in vehicle excise duty in the 2017 Budget; and it was also held back by Bank of England guidance warning banks against lending too much money for car purchases, in a market where practically everybody buys a car on credit, rather than their having the cash to pay the considerable sums that cars cost these days. So there was a very predictable slowing of the UK car market, in parallel with the slowing going on elsewhere.

That was compounded by the fact that the UK had been incredibly successful at building a very large diesel car industry, and in particular a diesel car engine-making industry in the United Kingdom, just in time for the EU and the UK to become very hostile to diesels and send out the message that people really should not buy diesels, and that in future diesels may even be taxed or regulated off the road. There could also be new controls on diesels, with the Government, in common with the EU and other Governments, wanting people to buy electric cars before they felt confident enough in electric cars, or before the prices of electric cars come down to a more realistic level for them to be a feasible opportunity for people. So we have seen in the UK, as in China and in Europe, a big decline in the sale of traditional diesels, and there has not been an off-set in sufficient numbers by the new vehicles that are being introduced.

So the Government need to look at the car industry and recognise that the issues affecting it are a combination of taxation, availability of credit, and messages about what kind of car people are allowed to buy and drive. The industry needs to be given some time to complete the transition that Governments want, and it is not yet in a state where it can sell enough electric cars to immediately replace the lost capacity that it is experiencing on diesels.

[Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

I thank my right hon. Friend for securing this very important and wide-ranging debate. He mentioned the car industry, which is largely based in the north-east of England, but it based itself there because clear incentives for it to do so were provided by the Government at the time. Does he agree that if we are going to rebalance this economy and level it up, we will need some incentives for businesses to start up in or relocate to some of these areas?

[John Redwood]

Yes, I am happy for there to be attractive reasons why people should go to the parts of the economy that have been less heavily invested in and that are less pressurised. However, with cars the issue is demand; there is not enough demand for the very good cars that the industry currently makes. The Government want to change the kind of cars that people buy, but it will take time for Britain, or anywhere else for that matter, to be able to produce the millions of electric cars that the Government want us to buy, at a price and to a specification that people like.

So, this is a top-down revolution and the public are not yet fully engaged in it in the way that the Government would like them to be. When polled, the public say that electric cars are a very good idea. However, when they are then asked, “Well, when are you buying your electric car?”, the answer is, “Well, not yet. Not me. I want a better subsidy on the car, I want a lower price, I want a higher range”—whatever it is.

There are still issues about engaging the public, which is why we are getting this industrial dislocation. China has experienced exactly the same thing and one would have thought that China would have continuous growth in cars, because it is coming from a much lower level of car ownership and individual income. However, even in China car volume is down, because of the regulatory changes and the dislocation involved in going from traditional product to electric product.

In addition, the Minister and his colleagues should look at the issue of property. Property is a very important part of the UK economy. It is often an asset base for people to borrow against in order to develop their business, and it is often the main way in which individuals hold their personal wealth. By buying a house on a mortgage and gradually paying the mortgage off, property often becomes people’s principal asset, which gives them some wealth and financial stability.

However, we have a property market in the UK that has been damaged by the very high stamp duties that were introduced under the previous Government, and the Government should look at that issue very carefully. I do not think that the Government are even maximising the revenues from stamp duties, and it might not be a bad idea for them to ask, “What are the rates that would maximise the revenues?” At the higher price levels in property, transactions have been very badly affected; indeed, they have been massively reduced by the very high rates at the top end of the market. So, the Treasury constantly has to revise down its forecasts of how much revenue it collects from stamp duty.

A more free-flowing property market would be a very good thing, because it would create all sorts of other work for people who are in the refurbishment and removals business, and above all it would allow people to fit their property needs more closely to the property that they have. A lot of potential switching in the market is being frustrated: some people have houses too big for them but they do not fancy paying the stamp duty on the trade-down property, and other people would like a bigger property, but the stamp duty would be just such a big addition to the higher price that they would have to pay for that property.

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

I congratulate the right hon. Gentleman on securing the first Westminster Hall debate of the new Session. Does he agree that there has been a major problem in the United Kingdom for many decades, which is that people—for one reason or another—have been encouraged to treat the house that they live in not as a place to live but as a speculative investment, on which they expect to make money? Also, does he accept that many people have been severely stung, because they thought that they would be able to stretch for a mortgage that they could not afford, in order to sell the house for more money in 10 years’ time? If the value of the house does not increase in 10 years’ time, they have a problem. That situation caused the crash in 2007-08 and it has caused a number of minor crashes since then. Does he also agree that more needs to be done to make sure that people who only have the money that they are investing in their house are protected against the possibility of losing their house and everything else when the market crashes?

[John Redwood]

Most people buy a house because they want somewhere to live that is theirs, and that they can then do up and change in the way they see fit, subject to planning. But yes, of course, it is also a way of holding wealth, and I repeat what I said: for many people it becomes their largest single asset. I do not think that is a bad thing. I do not think that people are treating their main property as a trading counter; it is where they wish to live, and they will only move when they want a different house, mainly for living purposes. People would only be able to buy property speculatively if the property was their second or third house, and not many people are in the fortunate position of having such wealth.

There is no absolute protection against house prices going down; they do from time to time, as the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) pointed out. However, if someone’s aim is to live in a house long term, and if they have taken out an affordable mortgage, temporary fluctuations in house prices are not life-threatening or wealth-threatening to any worrying extent, and they will just live through the period when house prices dip because there has been a recession, or whatever.

Fortunately, we do not seem to be looking at such a situation in the immediate future, and it is very important that we have a growth strategy, so that the slowdown in the economy that we have experienced in recent months is turned around quickly and does not become something worse, which could have negative consequences in the way that the hon. Gentleman talked about.

So my No.1 message to the Government is not to underestimate the damage that clumsy taxes can do, and they may even end up costing the Treasury, as stamp duty has done, because it is not collecting as much as it should. That is probably the case with vehicle excise duty as well, because of the volume impact on new cars, which relates to a whole series of factors; it does not just relate to the vehicle excise duty, but that was another complication in the situation.

As the Minister has this particular responsibility, I urge him to look again at IR35. We want a very flexible economy in which people can choose flexible employment, rather than have it forced on them. We have had a relatively flexible small business sector, but it is being damaged by the top-down imposition of the IR35 rules. I hear all sorts of stories from across the country of people having to stop their contracting business or losing contracts because the big companies that might employ them are worried they might get dragged into a retrospective tax increase in employer and employee national insurance. That is damaging the small contracting sector, and I urge the Government not to carry on doing that when we want to encourage more self-employment and allow self-employed people to go on to build bigger businesses.

One of the Office for National Statistics figures I saw recently, which I found fascinating, was that in London there are more than 1,500 businesses per 10,000 people, whereas in the lower income parts of the country there are half that number. There is a huge gap between the volume of enterprise in London, which is the richest part of the country in terms of average incomes, and much of the rest of the country, where incomes could be higher. It is not easy to break into why there are so many more businesses in London. In part, it is because people are better off and have more spending money—demand is important in setting up a business—but it is also to do with the general business environment and the concentration of people, talent, enterprise and spending power that we see in the capital. We need to do something similar in other parts of the country. Building more businesses is crucial, and IR35 is getting in the way of doing that.

Some 4.5 million people in the country who work for themselves do not have any employees, and they are afraid of taking on an extra employee because of the implications, whether for regulation, tax or otherwise, or because they think it will be too difficult to manage. We need to look at that step up in building a business, when someone goes from just working for themselves to having an employee or two. It is important that we make that step as easy as possible, because if another million self-employed people decided that they wanted a single employee, that would be transformational. That would obviously create a lot of extra demand in the labour market.

We need to look at taxes on employment and the complications of employment. Anything that the Government can do to reduce the tax on employment is a very good idea. We cannot collect tax revenue just by taxing things we do not like, but where we have a choice, it is better to tax things we do not like rather than things we do like. All parties in the House like the ideas of well-paid jobs and of more work, so we need to work away in Government to see how we can reduce the burden of taxes on work such as the apprentice levy, the national insurance levy on both the employee and the employer and other concealed taxes on work.

We also need to look at taxes on entrepreneurship. A larger population of people who have great ideas, who can change markets and who can persuade others that they have something people might want to buy is vital to the process of creating a more prosperous United Kingdom. We need to ensure that the offer on capital gains tax in particular is a fair one. People who have built a business over the years should not feel that they will be taxed again on it all, because they have been taxed on the activity in the business. Capital gains has to be a fair regime, and I urge the Government to keep the enterprise allowance arrangements so that entrepreneurs can keep a lot of the benefits from building their business.

It is said that our productivity performance in recent years has been disappointing and that that is a puzzle. I do not quite understand why it is a puzzle; it is exactly what we would expect. We have had a major reduction in North sea oil output. The way the figures are calculated means that it is one of the most productive sectors, because labour productivity is based on the amount of revenue or value-added generated by an individual, and an individual in the oil industry produces a huge amount of revenue due to the windfall element in the oil price. We had a very big squeeze on many of the activities in the City that were apparently profitable before 2008. Those activities flattered the productivity figures, but some of the profits turned out not to be genuine, and a lot of them have been squeezed out. Again, a high-earning, apparently highly productive part of the economy has gone through a big change, and we have lost that.

We have been a successful economy—this is a strength—in creating lots of new jobs, but a lot of them are relatively low paid so they do not score very well under productivity scoring. If we compare our productivity with that for continental countries with unemployment rates two or three times as high as ours, their productivity is higher, because people we are employing on low pay here would be unemployed there, and the unemployed do not count in the productivity figures—they are just ignored as if they do not exist.

[Kevin Hollinrake]

My right hon. Friend is making some very good points, but is productivity not principally a regional problem? The gross value added per capita in London is about £50,000 a year. In the north-east, the north-west and Yorkshire, it is about £20,000 a year. Is that not where we have to level up, because that would drive productivity right across the UK?

[John Redwood]

I agree, and one of the things I hope will happen as we pursue policies that spread prosperity more widely is that some of the higher value-added activities that people come to London for will be carried out in other cities around the country. If somebody established a manufacturing business in a great northern city, it would be good if they had their media advice, public relations, legal advice, accountancy advice, consultancy advice and all the rest of it from firms in northern cities that specialised in those things, rather than the current model, where many of them come to London to take advantage of the excellent business and professional services available there.

In attracting more industry to the northern and western cities and towns, we need also to be conscious of encouraging the cluster of service businesses around them that can add value in other ways. In modern manufacturing, a lot of the traditional work is now done by machines and robots, so the individual plant does not attract a large number of jobs; the jobs are in all the other things—marketing, PR, services, legal, accountancy, invoicing and so forth—and we want to make sure that enough of those jobs come with the factory to the local area. That is where we have to see what other policies we need to put in place to spread such jobs more widely around the country.

The productivity puzzle is also caused by the public sector not innovating enough and not raising its productivity. It has been noticeable under Labour and Conservative Governments and the coalition that public sector productivity has stalled. That is disappointing, and we have a large public sector, so we need to get the Government to direct their attention to that, because the one bit of the productivity puzzle they can actually manage is the public sector, and Ministers have various powers to encourage and promote innovation.

I was interested to hear the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care talking last night about the role of innovation, new ideas and smaller businesses in the health service. There is huge scope for better partnership between innovative smaller and medium-sized companies and the public sector. The current contracting rules do not work well for many small businesses. It is difficult, because often the public sector wants a large solution for an awful lot of locations, and the small business can only handle so much and cannot scale up quickly enough. I hope that the Government will have another look at how the best of the private sector can be harnessed for the productivity increase we need from better innovation and better technology in big areas of the public services.

We must make sure that we see the technological revolution as a potential friend and not a potential threat. I was quite surprised this morning when reading the background papers for Davos—a meeting that I was not invited to and did not want to go to—to see how negative they were about technology. It was seen as a threat to be tamed and slowed down; as something that was going to destroy jobs and be very disruptive. It talked about the endless dislocations, whereas the public see much of technology as their friend. Why does America have huge success with trillion-dollar companies? Some of them are, and some of them seem to be trillion-dollar companies. Where have Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Netflix got their strength from? They have got it because they have public support. It is all very well for a politician to say, “They are wrong about this and wrong about that, and we need to regulate them and stop them doing this”, but it is a bottom-up revolution that we should not ignore. Those are things that people want. They have completely changed how people lead their lives.

People now go out to restaurants together and sit there with their iPods or smartphones not talking to each other. I am not sure that that is a great development for human relationships, but it shows that the technology has been transformative for people’s lives. They have much more instant information and much more ability to communicate to set out their views. It is not just what the BBC tells us; it is what we push back through social media these days, which some of us welcome. So we have a new model, and there is a danger that the Davos elite see it as a threat to their control over everybody. They are getting out of touch with what the public want. We should broadly welcome the technological revolution. I understand that a lot of our constituents like its services and products. We need to learn to live with it and co-operate with it in a sensible way.

As we come out of the EU, there are huge opportunities for us. Contrary to the misleading comments that some people have made, I have always taken the view that we can be better off as we leave the EU, not worse off. I have never understood why people are so negative about it all. I will simply end with a few obvious points about how we can be better off in certain areas. We can have a much bigger fishing industry. I hope it will be a prime task this year to create the conditions for that. We certainly do not want to keep on sacrificing our fish to over-exploitation by continental trawlers. We want to land more of our own fish while having a good conservation policy for stocks as a total, and that should then lead to onshore activities for fish processing and food manufacturers based on the excellent fish stock that we have available.

There are huge opportunities in farming. A lot of people would like to buy more local produce for all sorts of reasons. We like to support local farms. We are conscious of wanting to cut down food miles. We often like the flavours and benefits of locally produced food. We can do more of that, and there are ways in which, as we come out of the common agricultural policy, we could aim to get back to the levels of self-sufficiency in food that we enjoyed before our period in the common agricultural policy lowered it quite considerably.

We should also concentrate on our defence industries. We are making a commitment to spend more each year on defence so that we are more secure, but we are not truly secure unless we can make all the weapons and defence goods that we need in time of war. We must not be dependent on other people’s technology that we cannot access independently, or on imports over perilous sea lanes in times of conflict. We need to be able to scale up, and I urge all those involved in defence to see a big opportunity for us to make more of our own defence equipment. We should certainly make sure that we have control so that if the need ever arose, which I hope it does not, we would be able to scale up quickly without major issues.

I have gone on for rather a long time and I know that colleagues wish to debate these matters, so I will leave my other ideas for another time, but my conclusions are that we should not underestimate the damage that high tax rates do; that we should not underestimate the ability to generate more revenue, if we are brave on tax rates, by getting them down; and that we should pay particular attention to the big ticket items—homes and cars—that have been damaged by a variety of negative forces in recent years. I say a big thank you for the change in fiscal strategy. I hope that the Bank of England will join the party in wanting to promote growth as well, because that would make a considerable difference. It has been going in the wrong direction for some time, unfortunately. Let us make sure that all the obvious opportunities from Brexit, particularly in sectors that have been under strong EU control, are grasped warmly because they would give us some early wins.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (in the Chair)]

The debate will last until 11 o’clock, and I am obliged to call the Front-Bench speakers at no later than 10.27. The guideline limits are 10 minutes for the Scottish National party, 10 minutes for Her Majesty’s Opposition and 10 minutes for the Minister. Sir John Redwood has two or three minutes to sum up the debate at the end, but until 10.27 we are in Back-Bench time. Three Members wish to speak. I will not impose a limit, but the guideline is about seven minutes each so that everyone gets to speak.

--- Later in debate ---

[Amanda Solloway (Derby North) (Con)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) on introducing this important debate. May I add that it is absolutely freezing in here, and I am very cold?

One of the most important duties of any caring Government is to grow the economy. The question of how a Government should tend to and nurture the economy has been tackled by politicians of all stripes and colours, and answered in many ways, arguably to varying degrees of success. Fundamentally, people’s lives—whether they can support their families, get on the housing ladder, or enjoy some of the nicer things in life—rest largely on the Government’s safe stewardship of the economy. Governments have a responsibility to protect and promote the livelihoods of their citizens.

We should all be really proud of the Government’s record on growth. Since the crash of 2008-09, when the economy collapsed by 4.2%, the Government have managed to grow the economy every single year. That said, we cannot rest on our laurels. There is a lot more that we need to do. Libraries could be filled with writings on the north-south divide. In 2012, The Economist said, rightly or wrongly, that the divide was so broad that the north and the south were starting to resemble different countries. Growth continues to be stronger in the south. London recorded a 1.1% annual rise in output per person to £54,700 in 2018, increasing the per capita gap with the poorest region, the north-east, where growth was only 0.4% to £23,600 per head, according to data from the Office for National Statistics.

Less well documented, however, is the increasing gap between the east and the west. Across the midlands and the north, the growth of the west has been twice as fast as that of the east since the 2008 financial crisis. Do not get me wrong: London and the south, as well as cities such as Manchester, are assets to the country and we should be really proud of them. However, regardless of where we live in these isles, we should all share the fruits of economic growth.

To address the problem, we must not bring those places down, but bring areas such as the east midlands up with them. The Government are not blind to the problem: the midlands engine for growth, which we must ensure happens, and the northern powerhouse show that the Government are listening, and are determined to address the issue. The 2020s offer a unique opportunity to rethink how we can foster growth in our regions.

I could list a range of issues that we could talk about, including investing in transport, investing in our high streets, which I know we are doing, and supporting leadership in SMEs, which I am incredibly passionate about. However, I am conscious of time, and I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake) would like to speak, so I will limit myself to one topic: free ports.

As I am sure we all know, free ports are areas that are exempt from normal customs and procedural rules that are enforced by the Government. They aim to encourage businesses to locate and grow there, bringing growth, jobs and investment to local communities. I am glad that the Prime Minister will introduce free ports as we start our new relationships with trading partners across the globe. I would love one to be introduced in the east midlands, which already has the key ingredients to justify one: a wealth of manufacturing, the means to store goods, and the access to reach international markets easily, building on East Midlands airport’s cargo capability.

Proposals are being explored for a free port that might incorporate both East Midlands airport and the neighbouring East Midlands Gateway, plus the site of the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, just down the road from where I live, which will be decommissioned by 2025. A free port would position the east midlands as a viable and exciting proposition for businesses that need to import components for assembly before exporting assembled goods to overseas markets, while not being subject to excessive tariffs.

[John Redwood]

My hon. Friend might like to think about adding an enterprise zone to the free port. Obviously the free port allows people to import and export, but the enterprise zone allows people to sell to the domestic market as well.

[Amanda Solloway]

I thank my right hon. Friend. That is an excellent idea, which I will certainly look into.

Of course, as the MP for Derby North, I would call for an east midlands free port. However, I believe that they have the potential to unlock and boost all corners of our country, and will go far to reduce some of the current imbalances. It is important that regardless of where people live they are able to go as far as their abilities can take them. I believe that the Government’s free port plans will go a long way to achieving that.

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[Anneliese Dodds (Oxford East) (Lab/Co-op)]

It has been a pleasure to listen to this interesting debate. I was encouraged by some of the comments of the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood), whose position is perhaps more similar to that of the Labour party than he might be delighted to hear, but I disagreed with his conclusions in some areas.

When preparing for the debate, I anticipated that the right hon. Member’s take would follow his comments before Christmas, when he welcomed what he described as the “turning around” of the mood in relation to the economy by the Prime Minister, which will

“take some cash…and now is the time to spend a bit of that…That will show that the country has made wise decisions up to this point, and that Brexit will not be damaging to our economy”.—[Official Report, 19 December 2019; Vol. 669, c. 65.]

Of course, that is a bit of a change from some of the advice that we have heard he gave to investors not to continue to invest in the UK.

[John Redwood]

I wish that those completely untrue statements were not constantly repeated. I have never said anything negative about our prospects because of Brexit—never, never. I have always been positive about Brexit.

[Anneliese Dodds]

I am sure that anybody listening to the debate will be delighted to look back at the article in the Financial Times. I hope that they will agree with the right hon. Gentlemen’s statement; some commentators have disagreed.

[John Redwood]

It does not mention Brexit. Brexit is not in the article.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Redwood]

It is a great pity that Labour Members have yet again chosen to completely misrepresent my article in the Financial Times. Had they read the article, they would have seen that it did not mention the word “Brexit”, because it was not about Brexit. At the time I was writing that article, as today, I said consistently that Brexit offers lots of opportunities that can make us better off, if my right hon. Friends in the Government do the right things, as I hope they will.

One thing they could do is take VAT off green products. We have taken green policy to extremes today by turning all the heating off in the building, and I wish they had warned us that we needed to bring our grey coats in order to be true greens. There are many green things we can do. Taking VAT off products such as draft insulation, boiler controls, wind farm parts and so forth would be a good idea, and we can do that as we leave the EU. I recommend that strongly to the Minister.

I recommend to my hon. Friend the Member for Derby North (Amanda Solloway) that an enterprise zone allied to a freeport would give it extra impetus, because there would be an easing of tax rules, business rates, planning regulations and so forth, which would stimulate far more enterprise at the same time as encouraging the import-export trade, free of having to pay the tariffs on those things that are re-exported.

The debate on productivity has been useful. I agree with the Minister that we do not want fewer doctors or teachers in relation to the number of patients or pupils. I am very pleased that the Government are recruiting extra, but there are many things that can be done by applying great modern technology to the public sector, particularly to all the administrative functions. We need to promote people into more rewarding jobs and give them much more computer power to do the things they have been doing. That is the way to get a higher-wage economy and to have more enriching and more worthwhile jobs. We want computers to take more of the strain throughout the public sector, as they are doing in many parts of the private sector. We need to make sure that we get an investment drive.

Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).

Spending Round 2019

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Wednesday 4th September 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. There is extensive interest in the Chancellor’s statement, but I remind the House that there is a ten-minute rule motion to follow and other important business that must come onstream absolutely no later than 3 o’clock, and that therefore there is a premium on brevity from Back and Front Benches alike. I also make the obvious point that realistically lots of people who want to contribute will not have the opportunity to do so.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Wokingham and West Berkshire Councils need money for social care and schools. The current funding is not adequate. I am grateful to the Chancellor. This is very welcome. Does he agree that, at a time of world slowdown, led by a manufacturing recession in several leading countries, a boost to the economy is much needed here and that this is part of that boost?

[Sajid Javid]

My right hon. Friend speaks with great experience. I very much agree that one of the outcomes of today’s spending round will be a further confidence boost to our economy.

Animal Welfare (Sentencing) Bill

Lord Redwood Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons
Wednesday 10th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Sir David Amess (Southend West) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith), who has been a consistent champion of animal welfare since the moment she was elected to this House.

Hooray—Parliament is doing something! At long last we are making it worth while to come here. Colleagues should recognise that this is a broken Parliament. Why is it broken? Because we had an ill-advised general election, which my party obviously decided to hold. It was a disastrous result from my party’s point of view. We lost our majority and cobbled together some sort of alliance with the Democratic Unionist party. It has taken the business managers, who have come and gone over the past two years, a long time to get a grip on what to do in this sort of Parliament. At long last, they seem to have realised that there are things we can do. The Chief Whip has just disappeared, but one of his colleagues is on the Treasury Bench. I say to the business managers: if my party is struggling with a legislative programme for the new Queen’s Speech, why not consult the hon. Member for Southend West? I have a whole range of measures on which I think we could get some sort of cross-party support. Our constituents are very frustrated about the situation. If we are not going to have a general election, we cannot just keep on discussing meaningless motions. We have to get on and do something, and we could do a whole raft of things that could improve the quality of life in this country.

There is no point in our legislating on anything unless we enforce the legislation, so I was puzzled by the exchange earlier when my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Sir Greg Knight) challenged my hon. Friend the Minister about cruelty to tethered horses. I listened to an Adjournment debate led by my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) on that very same issue. It is a puzzle to me, because in 1988, through a ten-minute rule Bill that became an Act of Parliament—the noble Lord Hogg was the Minister at the time—we got on to the statute book an Act to stop horses, ponies and donkeys being cruelly tethered and to make sure that they were properly watered and fed. For goodness’ sake, what has happened to that Act of Parliament? I realise that the longer we are here —I will come to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin) in a moment—the more we are forgotten, but that is an Act of Parliament. If we have the law already, it is no good people jumping up with suggestions; we need to do something. We need to enforce the law that already exists, so I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will do something about that.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Does this measure not try to address that very point? We are all extremely frustrated that a good law is not being properly enforced; this measure might help.

[Sir David Amess]

My right hon. Friend, who has years of wisdom and experience, is yet again absolutely right. My hon. Friend the Member for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin) mentioned the fact that had he been listened to in 2006, the measure we are discussing would have already happened.

I am not going to fall out with the Opposition, but the hon. Member for Workington (Sue Hayman) has heard me say before that when the new Labour leader became Prime Minister in 1997, he and his team consulted a huge range of animal charities, and there was, over Labour’s 13 years in government, some disappointment about the failure to deliver. That is except for one issue, on which I might fall out with one or two colleagues, and that is foxhunting. I have always felt—in those days, there were just four or five of us—that the Labour party did a good thing on foxhunting. However, I absolutely empathise with my hon. Friend the Member for North Herefordshire in respect of those 13 years.

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[Anna Turley (Redcar) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess). There is a rare outbreak of consensual agreement across the Benches today, which I am proud to be part of.

All of us who are speaking in the Chamber today are speaking on behalf of those who do not have a voice. We are speaking on behalf of those whom it is our human duty to protect, to feed, to care for and to love. In particular, I speak today on behalf of Baby the bulldog and of Scamp the dog and, of course, of so many other animals who have met their sad end at the hands of humans. They should have been nurtured, stroked and loved, but instead they were ultimately abused and then killed.

I am very glad finally to have the opportunity to speak to this Bill, which has, as has been said, been a long time coming. I was proud to spend the night in Parliament in July 2016, as I queued for a private Member’s Bill that was pretty much, word for word, the Bill that we have here today, and I am so pleased to see it here in paper. That Bill sought to increase the maximum sentencing for animal cruelty from six months to five years, building on a lot of work that had been done in the past, but sadly, that Bill was objected to by the Government Whips and never made it to Second Reading, and then ultimately fell with the onset of the 2017 general election. Of course, I am delighted that it is here, and I will not hold what happened against the Government. A few months later, I am delighted to say, they saw sense and announced support for the policy, and here we are today.

The change in law has been a long time coming. For too long animal abusers have been getting away with a slap on the wrist, and this Bill will finally, I hope, bring justice for the thousands of animals who have suffered human cruelty. Like the hon. Member for Southend West, I did not come to Parliament expecting to champion animal cruelty. It was an incident of the most horrific cruelty in my constituency that caused me to understand the scale of what is happening around the country, and made me determined to make a difference and to change things. I apologise for some of the graphic details that I am about to share, but it is really important that we understand the reality of what is happening, and has happened, in the country and what has driven us to bring about this change in law today.

Baby was a small bulldog who was cruelly abused by Andrew Daniel Frankish in Redcar. Baby was held aloft by Andrew Frankish at the top of some wooden stairs before he repeatedly threw her down them, laughing as his brother filmed it. Baby was completely submissive throughout the episode, not even making a noise as she landed on the stairs, bouncing to the foot them and crashing through a baby gate to the floor. Her neck was stamped on and she was thrown to the floor with force over and over again. Her small chest was jumped on with the full body weight of one of the Frankish brothers.

One of the men said, “See if we can make it scream any more. We should throw it down the stairs by its ears,” before picking her up, throwing her against the wall, headbutting her twice and throwing her down the stairs again. Baby was tortured and beaten by those who were supposed to care for her. The whole horrible ordeal was filmed by the brothers for their entertainment, and they are heard laughing on the mobile phone. Baby should not have had to suffer that horrific abuse, but she did, and sadly was put down shortly afterwards. The evidence was found two years later on a mobile phone that happened to have been dropped on a supermarket floor; but for that, those two young men would never have been brought to justice.

We would hope that Baby would have seen justice after what she had been through, but sadly not. Despite the hard work of the police, the RSPCA and all those who gave evidence, the brothers were convicted of causing unnecessary suffering to her by subjecting her to unnecessary physical violence—an offence under the Animal Welfare Act 2006. But she was let down because the two brothers received a suspended sentence, just six months’ tagged curfew and £300 in costs. No one in this Chamber or the country can possibly feel that the justice system did its job that day.

That was when I decided to try to amend the law to ensure that sentences fit the crime in horrific cases such as this, and I was pleased to present my Animal Cruelty (Sentencing) Bill two years ago. During the progress of that Bill, another horrific incident in my constituency made the case for a change in the sentencing law even more pressing. A small dog named Scamp was found buried alive in woods near Redcar with a nail hammered into its head. The perpetrators pleaded guilty to offences under the Animal Welfare Act and were sentenced to just four months—not enough time for reflection, punishment or rehabilitation.

[John Redwood]

I thank the hon. Lady for bringing these horrendous stories to the attention of the House; they are very powerful in making the case that we all want to make. I thank her for what she is doing.

[Anna Turley]

I really appreciate that sentiment; that was very decent of the right hon. Gentleman. So often these cases bubble up in the media but then disappear. If this place is for anything, it is for responding to situations such as this and acting. I am proud that we are all here today to do that.

Scamp, as I said, was found buried alive. The people of my constituency were horrified by the two cases I have mentioned. I pay tribute to their response. Vigils were held in my community for those animals. Hundreds of people came to lay flowers and candles and to send out the message, loudly and defiantly, that the perpetrators do not represent our community. They do not represent the people of Redcar, who are decent and kind and love animals. But the people are angry: they feel that the criminal justice system has let them down, as do the majority of people across our nation of animal lovers.

On researching how these crimes could have resulted in such impossibly lenient sentences, I was astonished to find that the maximum sentence for any form of animal abuse is just six months’ custody. Incredibly, that has not changed since the Protection of Animals Act 1911, which was introduced, essentially, to make it an offence to override or overload animals pulling loads on the street or in pits. The law is lagging a century behind. If we are to continue declaring ourselves to be a nation of animal lovers, this Bill is necessary to send a loud and clear message that we take animal cruelty seriously.

I join others in paying tribute to the animal welfare organisations that have supported this campaign and for their efforts—day in, day out—in saving and protecting animals and investigating crimes. Specifically, I would like to thank the RSPCA, the Dogs Trust, Battersea Dogs & Home and the League Against Cruel Sports. I also thank the wider public for their contribution to the progress that the Bill represents. Colleagues across the House will have been lobbied by many of their constituents who have passionately held views on the need to protect animals and ensure that sentencing is a proportionate punishment.

NHS Pensions: Taxation

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Monday 8th July 2019 Commons Chamber

[Elizabeth Truss]

That is also why the Secretary of State is meeting representatives of the medical profession today. The hon. Lady asks whether the 50:50 scheme is enough and whether more can be done. Those are precisely the issues that the Health Secretary is discussing with those representatives of the medical profession. Of course he is working hand in hand with the Treasury to find NHS-specific solutions to deal with the problems that we all acknowledge and that have been raised today by my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous). We all acknowledge that.

The important thing to remember is that, while we need to look for NHS-specific solutions—which is precisely what the Health Secretary is working on—the broader issue of taxation cannot be looked at just for one profession. The broader issue of the pension system has to be looked at in the round and in the whole. I am not going to stand at the Dispatch Box today and announce an entirely new pensions policy. We are pragmatically dealing with the situation that has arisen in the NHS, and of course we continue to review our pensions system to ensure that it makes financial sense for those people contributing to it as well as for the Exchequer. We pay more than £50 billion-worth of pension tax relief and it is important that we get value for money for that—that is why the reforms were conducted earlier—but of course we continue to review the arrangements to ensure that they are providing value for money as well as the right incentives for people to save for their later age.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

In west Berkshire and Wokingham, we desperately need to recruit and retain more doctors and other senior medical personnel. Will the Treasury look at the 60% tax rate that kicks in at £100,000 for a band of income above that? A lot of important public service workers, not just in the NHS, are caught in that band and are paying higher marginal tax rates than people earning a lot more.

[Elizabeth Truss]

My right hon. Friend makes an interesting point. In general, I am in favour of lower taxes and a simpler tax system that always rewards those who go out to work.